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Whoever says troll first, wins

Have you ever noticed that in a discussion you have (mostly in Twitter) and it’s an actual discussion that goes to the core of a persons views, there are two options, either the person is a big enough person to “expose” themselves and stand behind their viewpoint.

Or, and this is what usually happens, they’ll cry “troll” pretty quickly and thereby put the other person under pressure, to say the least, by discrediting and shaming them.

This is a pattern that I have observed many many times in the discussions surrounding authors rights: whenever I stand up for my assertion that a strong individual authors right modeled after the European legal system empowers the individual and forces “bigger” business partners to actually having to negotiate. Whereas a simple copyright as in the Anglo-American legal system favors the aggregators (labels, publishers, film studios), infrastructure providers (ISPs, hosting providers) and media services (YouTube, Spotify etc).

So when I ask individuals who work in promoting the copyleft movement, what their thinking, motivation and benefit behind weakening the authors rights are, I get attacked and called a troll.

I can openly say what the benefits of a strong authors right to both the individual and the culture businesses are. Why can’t my “opponents” practice the same openness and have to resort to attacking me? And in this case the “me” and “them” is the collective behind each movement. But it speaks volumes that the copyleftists don’t really name their motivation: because their motivation is targeted at destroying a market.